seanwes podcast

Tangible insights on creativity and business every single Wednesday and Friday.

Want to make a living with your passion? From products and marketing to professionalism and clients, you'll get answers to the hard-hitting questions.

Join entrepreneurs Sean McCabe and Ben Toalson as they let you inside their discussions on the many facets of making a living online. You'll come away from every episode with something of value that you can apply to your business.

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Subscribe to get podcast episodes, videos, articles and newsletters every week that will help you take your entrepreneurship to the next level. You’ll also receive my book, The Overlap Technique, for free when it launches.

We continue the hustle episode in an exhilarating part 2! I take you even further behind the scenes of the Learn Lettering 2.0 launch.

While I’m still not sharing exact revenue numbers yet (that’s coming in a future exhaustive case study), I do share my marketing techniques, and my crazy idea of giving away the $99 Starter Class for free, how it’s resulting in a video hosting bill in the thousands of dollars, and why I think it will be worth it.

I talk about the importance of honesty in marketing and how I’m trying something new and taking a leap. I’m sharing everything as I go so you can learn from it.

Learn Lettering 2.0 launched on Monday and as I write this, 3,300 people have signed up for Learn Lettering. I talk about how I was able to get this many signups in a little over one day, what it took to produce the course, how I wrote over 100,000 words in the past 6 weeks, what my 30-day hand lettering blog post series has done for building the list, how we’re getting people to share it, and a ton more.

It’s a speeding bullet of an episode and it will not quit. Just like our hustle.

It’s so jam-packed, in fact, we ended up splitting it into two parts. I do leave you with a cliffhanger, but not before providing massive value and behind-the-scenes marketing insights.

Seriously, in the middle of the show, Ben said he wanted to leave right then and go apply what he heard.

Oh! I almost forgot. We announce a very special live event happening for e200 of the seanwes podcast and how you can join us. You’ll have to listen to hear more about that.

Back by popular demand, my wife Laci joins me again for an episode on discovering what you’re passionate about.

Laci shares why she felt paralyzed and overwhelmed when it came to figuring out what her passion was. She had so many options and nothing was clearly standing out.

She felt like there was a lot of pressure to know what was the “right thing” to start with. There were all of these options, but nothing was 100% perfect. Was she supposed to wait for it to be perfect?

Then she had a breakthrough and sudden clarity.

Now she has direction and feels free to try something new. We talk about what brought about this clarity and how she overcame the overwhelming feeling of immobility.

The not-so-simple, deeper reasons? Well, that’s what I get into in this episode.

It’s very raw. I share real numbers—both the 3-figure dollar amount I was looking at in the bank as well as the 6-figure launch projections I’m projecting. I’m 100% transparent with it all.

I think this is one of the most real and vulnerable episodes to date. I talk about how even though I hustle like nobody’s business, I still have the desire to goof off and sink a ton of mindless hours into Reddit, YouTube, or Netflix.

I’m not immune to those temptations, but I also know that they don’t pay off. They aren’t fulfilling. It’s a false high.

I talk about how nothing compares to the feeling of satisfaction I’m getting from working hard and helping people and getting their words of encouragement every day. It fuels me. It’s incredibly fulfilling. I feel immensely satisfied and I wouldn’t trade it.

Today, I’ll be doing a shorter, hyper-focused episode on self-promotion.

I know a lot of people struggle with this. You have something you want to share, but you feel awkward telling people about it. It feels like you’re bragging or you’re being arrogant or something. Really, you just want to share something that you think is cool, or helpful, or valuable to someone, but for some reason it just feels weird.

In this short episode, I’m going to help you feel more confident about promoting, and not just feel less bad about it but actually feel good promoting!

Right now, you feel guilty promoting your stuff. It makes sense. It seems selfish at first, right? You feel like an attention hog. You feel like you’re just taking advantage of people who are giving you their attention.

Yet at the same time, you’re concerned because it feels like an awful, twisted mess. You actually want to provide them with more value, but they don’t even seem to know that it’s there. You “announce” it but nobody cares. What’s going on here?

She wants to talk to your spouse about money mindset and getting on the same page. Her goal in joining me on this show (truly, she came up with the topic!) was to help spouses of entrepreneurs understand your business investments even when it doesn’t seem to make sense.

When we streamed this episode live inside the Community, we had dozens of members listen live with their spouses and ask questions.

We hope this is something you can share and listen to together with your significant other to help stimulate the conversation about money and business investments when you work for yourself.

It’s not always easy and it’s especially difficult when you’re not the one making executive decisions. Laci helps give spouses of entrepreneurs a lot of clarity in what many members are already calling one of their favorite episodes of the seanwes podcast.

There’s this polarity between creative people and business people. You’re either creative, or you understand business. One or the other. That’s what the world would have you believe anyway.

It’s hard enough that the corporate world takes advantage of artists because most of us love what we do, but then artists themselves perpetuate the same garbage!

Artists themselves buy into the lie and tear down other artists. It’s terrible. If you ever begin to sell or profit from your artist, you end up getting hate from other artists because “you’re a sell out.” What they don’t realize is they’re holding themselves back too by devaluing everyone’s work.

It’s crab mentality. That’s where you have crabs in a bucket that one could totally escape from if it weren’t for the other crabs pulling him back down. They don’t want you to escape the bucket of mediocrity!

I get really fiery about this topic. Ben does too because he hates the “starving artist” myth. I’m really passionate about this because it’s the reason I do what I do. I’m putting my neck out there every day, and I sincerely appreciate the people who are supportive of this show, but you would not believe the kinds of things people send and say!

I have to remember that I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing this for you. It’s just something that comes with the territory.

But here’s the reality: at the end of the day, artists who wield business will win. We talk about how to do that in today’s episode.

Have you ever spent a ton of time working on a blog post and wished that effort could be multiplied?

What people who are cranking out media like nobody’s business understand is the art of repurposing their content.

Essentially you take the content you just spent a ton of effort producing and reuse it in creative ways to get some extra mileage out of it.

I’m not just talking about posting in on different platforms (though we do have some very practice tips on how to get the most out of each platform) but adapting the content itself to a new medium.

We show you exactly where to start, how and when to repurpose, and what you need to be thinking about so that your new blog post, video, newsletter, or podcast episode resonates strongly with you audience.

But we’re not just talking about opening the floodgates and getting whatever clients you can. We’re going to show you exactly how to get the kind of clients you actually want.

You’ll learn how to never get another client from hell (warning: the answer is one you won’t like).

From the time a client lands on your website, to closing the deal, getting a signed contract, and getting paid, all the way to presenting the final solution, this episode walks you through each and every step meticulously.

Somehow for such an intense show that’s jam-packed with everything you didn’t learn at school (that you paid good money for) and how to get the clients you want without compromising your process and rates, we still manage to have a ridiculously good time and a lot of laughs.

It’s a fun and fiery show you’ll want (and need!) to listen to again and again just to take it all in—and that’s no exaggeration.

Boy do we get real in this episode. The Community members who listened live are saying it’s one of the best.

Tenacity. Where does it come from and how do you get it? I am constantly talking about the hustle and working hard, but is that drive something you’re just born with?

I tell my story of growing up and how the people I was around told me I could accomplish anything I put my mind to. I grew up around people who believed in me and spoke positivity into me. They told me I had the hand of Midas—that everything I touched turned to gold.

Now did they say that because it was true, or did I live out that reality because I believed what was said to me?

It’s probably a bit of both. I honestly believe the mindset that was created by the positive speaking is what bred my tenacity. I believed it, so I worked hard and as I worked hard, I believed it even more when I observed the results.

So how do you get this tenacity? You have to get around people who will kickstart the positive feedback loop. We talk about how to do this even when your friends or family aren’t positive and encouraging or when they don’t believe in your tenacity.

Something was working for you in the past and for some reason you stopped doing it.

Don’t feel bad, almost everyone does this! So much so that when I was on a plane last month, the guy sitting next to us on the flight home asked what I did. I decided to tell him my story.

At one point in my story, I said, “At this point, things were going pretty well…“ He interjected: “So you did something else, right?”

I laughed because of course he was right. He’d seen it time and again: people find something that works, but because of Shiny Object Syndrome they move on to something else.

In today’s episode, we look at revisiting the things that were working for you in the past to potentially double your revenue. We also talk about what you should be focusing on if you’ve yet to find something that works yet.

If you don’t believe me, go scroll through the seemingly endless 6,600 words of shownotes. What I’m saying is you can’t afford to miss this episode. I should seriously consider putting a price tag on it so you realize how much value there is.

Grab a pen and some paper because I guarantee you’re going to want to take notes.

Attention is the currency of this day and age. If you have people’s attention, you win.

But how do you get it?

That’s the kicker. Imagine people eagerly tuning in to what you have to say multiple times a week. Think about how powerful that would be. Think about the impact of promoting something when you have that kind of attention.

Today, we talk about ways to get attention (the good kind). We talk about how it takes doing something 50 or 100 times just to even get on peoples’ radar.

We answer a ton of questions live on the show from real people just like you who are trying to build their audience from scratch.

You’ll hear us share how to use teaching to increase your exposure—even if you don’t consider yourself a teacher. You don’t even need to be an expert to teach. We’ll show you how teaching is actually one of the best ways to learn and how to get people’s attention while you’re learning.

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